History museums, historical culture and the understanding of the past: a research from Mexico

ABSTRACT

Research based on the concepts of historical culture and historical consciousness provides a novel approach to the analysis of history-making in museums. This article is based on the creation of a heuristic framework that allows for a more comprehensive understanding of both history museums as social institutions and their visitors’ experiences of them. An analysis of key issues in how Mexican society relates to its own past (historical culture) shows that the State has played a dominant role, and thus greatly impacted historical matters – museums included. Yet, through a closer and more critical engagement with peoples’ understanding of the past (historical consciousness) the article also shows the complex, and at points contradictory, ways in which visitors relate to that historical culture. The article both contributes to under-researched areas (history museums and history in museums) and opens new paths of analysis in more consolidated ones (historical consciousness).

KEYWORDS:

• History museums
• historical consciousness
• historical culture
• Mexico
• visitor studies
• state

Acknowledgements

This research could not have been possible without the help of staff at the MNR and the GHMC, to whom I extend my deepest gratitude. At the Museo Nacional de la Revolución: Edgar Rojano, Miguel Enríquez, Catalina Gagern, Miguel Ángel Berúmen and Allan Llanos. At the Galería de Historia. Museo del Caracol: Patricia Torres, Julieta Gil, Martha Robles, Alfredo Hernández, Ángel Briones and Mario Álvarez. At Museográfica, Jorge Agostoni. I would also like to thank Dr Sheila Watson and Ariane Karbe for their insightful comments on preliminary versions of this article, to Mercy Trent for her help with proofreading, and to Jorge Moreno Cárdenas for the photographs included in the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Cintia Velázquez Marroni is a historian and museologist. In 2015, she obtained a PhD in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Both her MA and PhD theses won the Miguel Covarrubias National Prize for best museum research, awarded by the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico. As a museum practitioner, she has worked in curatorial, learning and outreach roles at the 68’ Memorial and the Tlatelolco University Cultural Centre. She is currently a Teaching Associate at the National School of Conservation, Restoration and Museography (ENCRyM) and a Museum Consultant at Taller de Museografía, an exhibition design firm, both located in Mexico City. Her areas of interest involve history in and of museums, public history and museums as research institutions.

ORCID

Cintia Velázquez Marroni http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6808-3453

Notes

1 Onwards, the GHMC (for its acronym in Spanish, Galería de Historia. Museo del Caracol) and MNR (for Museo Nacional de la Revolución).

2 So, for example, Museums and the Past (Gosselin and Livingstone 2016) contains some discussions on the differences between historical consciousness and historical thinking.

3 http://www.culturahistorica.es/historical_culture.html. The site is available both in English and Spanish. It has unpublished Spanish and English versions of German speaking authors such as Jörn Rüsen, fundamental for the topic at stake, but whose works have mostly not been translated to other languages.

4 As Edensor himself claims, the idea of structure might be a bit problematic in that it assumes fixation, but, like him, I consider that it is possible to have a more fluid view of structures – they have defined and flexible areas, they change, they are made of different parts, etc.

5 It is worth noting, for the purposes of future comparisons, that this scenario of continuity was radically different from the European context, where the Second World War created geo-political and social fragmentation to unprecedented levels.

6 Before the arrival of Spanish conquerors and colonisers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the territory that Mexico now occupies was populated by many indigenous nations. New Spain lasted for about 300 years until the war of independence broke out in 1810 and was officially achieved in 1821. After decades of turmoil, an independent republic eventually came into being. In 1877, Porfirio Díaz, a former liberal general, established a long dictatorship that lasted almost uninterruptedly until 1910 –the Porfiriato.

7 The Monument is a 1930s Art Deco adaptation of the remains of Porfirio Díaz’s unfinished legislative palace, and thus it is a potent metaphor of the triumph of the Revolution over the Porfiriato. It is worth noting that the 1930s project included a museum space in the basement but for financial reasons, although most likely for political ones, this part of the project did not succeed. Shortly after the 1985 earthquake, the space of the basement was re-discovered during a revision of the foundations of the Monument. A few weeks later, president Miguel de la Madrid decreed the creation of the MNR.

8 INAH for its name in Spanish: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. It was created in 1939 and since has been responsible for researching, preserving and disseminating the past. It manages a large network of archaeological sites, national museums, higher education schools and research and conservation centres. There is en English version of the main website on http://www.inah.gob.mx/en/

9 From now onwards, italics are used to refer to visitors’ comments. It is a rhetorical device by which I have synthesised in a sentence, using visitors’ own expressions or words, those frequent interpretations that I identified among the comments.

10 There were other exhibits at the GHMC and the MNR that people found interesting, for example mock-ups or objects like clothing, documents and newspapers. However, they mostly used generic – vague – terms to refer to them; not specific references like was indeed the case for the 1917 Constitution.